Hell in High Heels
by Vilinye
Summary: "Explain to me in terms that I can understand. What happened to time?" "A woman." River Song isn't one to sit passively. Whether it's shooting the Doctor's hats or facing down Weeping Angels, she is ready for the challenge. My one-shots, mostly character studies, for River Song.
1. Destiny

_This has to happen, River. No one can help me. _

She'll stay awake at night for it, she'll weep over it , she'll go to jail for it. And that is how it always has to be. Just as he remembers the destruction of Gallifrey, always weighing on him and the wild hope of the Corsair's absolution. He cannot let River bear that weight from now until the Library. So he tells her aloud, so her parents can remember and tell her too. "You are forgiven. Always and completely forgiven."


	2. Present Perfect

He knows that she will never be able to escape this moment as she lives. The touch will dissolve into light and shine beautifully, returning to the beach where she was killing him.

- _The present perfect tense, showing an action begun in the past that continues to this day…_

But there's nothing perfect about it, nothing at all. He has to die here, and she can't stop it no matter what he does. Every living thing is suffering, and he can't let it continue. All of his friends, all of his enemies, all the ones who would have told him otherwise are wrong. It has to end.


	3. Countdown to Goodbye

_If a clock could count down to the moment you meet your soul mate, would you want to know?_

* * *

She could feel the band under her sleeve, pulsing uncertainly. A flash of joy, twisted with searing pain. "Doctor, what are you doing this time?" River had picked up the wristband years ago, on a class trip to London with Amy and Rory.

"It will guide you to safety," the shopkeeper had said, shooing his parrot away. "To someone who is worth the monsters." She nicked it when her parents' backs were turned, though she was almost certain the shopkeeper winked at her when they walked out of the shop.

The strange numbers wound down, until one day, in a cornfield- but she couldn't think about that now. The Library had been closed for a century; there was no telling what would be waiting for her there. The teleport flickered, sending them to the empty planet.

* * *

He hadn't worn his band since Rose disappeared into the Vortex. The rows of dark grey zeros against light silver would only remind him of the soothing warmth when the last "1" ticked to "0." When he opened the doors in a shop basement and saw Rose standing in the shadows, joy shot up his arm, exploding like fireworks in a dark night.

After Bad Wolf Bay, he pried the metal from his wrist, held it in his hand, considered pitching it into the sea. Instead, he dropped into a pocket and tried to forget.

Why is he remembering this now, chained to a pipe as this strange woman with the lovely name-River Song-burns out every synapse and neuron in her skull?

She called him young. _Please tell me you know who I am. _ Why did those words squeeze his heart like a vice? Why this inexplicable urge to hold her hand as they run through corridors?

He shoves his free hand into his pockets. Maybe there's another screwdriver in the pockets-any model would do. His fingers close around smooth metal, too slender to be the sonic.

It's the band. The numbers are bright green, flashing sqrt-1:00:00:00:00:00.

You and me. Time and space. You watch us run.

"When it reaches zero, you've met the love of your life," the biodroid merchant had told him.

Rose Tyler. River Song. Could any man be so blessed as to have two loves? He squints at the numbers again: sqrt-1. The square root of negative one? Impossible! That must be his modifications at work. One irrationality to account for another.

The love of a lifetime. Just not _this_ lifetime.


	4. Stranger

"Hello, Sweetie." It's not tweed-and-bowtie, not this time. Just because she has pictures of all his faces doesn't mean she knows what order they come in. Maybe he's a future regeneration, maybe a past one. The hair is cute, thought, she thinks, though she's past the days of kisses.

"Get out! All of you, get out!"

_He's so cute when he gets shouty_. She ignores him for the moment. "Helmets off. We've got breathers." He's shouting orders, trying to sort things out, no time for hellos just yet. He's got a job to do, and sentiment would only get in the way.

But as soon as everyone's down to business, it's time to sort things out. "Where are we this time? Going by your face, I'd say it's early days for you, yeah? So…crash of the Byzantium, have we done that one yet?" She manages to speak of it without a tremor. "Not ringing any bells. Alright, picnic at Asgard. Have we done Asgard yet?" She remembers the warmth of the sun on the blanket, watermelon juice dribbling down his chin. She was still at University then, halfway between Mels and River. "Obviously not. Blimey, very early days then. Life with a time traveler, never knew it could be so complicated."

She sets down the notebook for a moment. His brown eyes search her face, as if he's reading the physic paper for a message. It's not _her_ Doctor's expression of bewilderment, half awkwardness and half amusement. It's confusion, pure and simple.

She meets his eyes for a moment. Oh, they're so_ young_. How could she have missed it? There's a darkness in his eyes, of course, but it's a human darkness, familiar to any soldier or prisoner. But with the Doctor—_her_ Doctor, she should say—childish glee hides self-loathing. "Look at you. You're young."

"I'm really not, you know."

"But you are…your eyes. You're younger than I've ever seen you before." This version hadn't left a little girl for fourteen years, hadn't watched the universe crack as the TARDIS exploded, hadn't lost his best friend to a Weeping Angel in Manhattan.

"You've seen me before then?"

"Doctor, please tell me you know who I am." Her voice trembles slightly but does not break. She already knows what he's going to say.

_The day is coming when I'll look into that man's eyes—my Doctor—and he won't have the faintest idea who I am._

"Who are you?"

_And I think it's going to kill me. _


	5. The Lost Boys

As soon as she recognizes the half-empty streets of Leadsworth, River lets go of Amy and Rory.

"What are you-" The words cut off as she reactivates the vortex manipulator. Alarms herald her return to StormCage, but she ignored them. Demons Run. She couldn't, wouldn't answer Amy and Rory's questions now. Instead, she takes a blue-bound book from its place and began writing.

_They'll never see Melody again. She's been dead for decades. burned on the streets of New York. All they'll get is Mels, and I wanted to apologize for that too. After Berlin, I tried to suppress that training, but...I must not have succeeded._

_Instead, I'm here, serving time for something I can't remember. There was a pyramid, eye-patches, and a kiss..._

She smiles for a moment.

The guards arrive, red-faced, staying well out of reach and lecturing about reduced rations and loss of privilege. She tunes them out, as always. Maybe he'll be back tonight, old enough to understand and young enough to be flustered.

She sets the journal down. It'll be "Amy and Rory" from here on, not "Mum and Dad"...not that she ever called them that, but it makes the flirting even more fun when the Doctor double-takes at Rory every five minutes.


	6. Burn Stars and Topple Gods

Old High Gallifreyan was never a spoken language, much less one of causal conversation. It was the language of the Vortex, the Matrix, the Panopticon, its forty-two forms of past tense custom-crafted to describe reality itself. One word, one meaning. To the distant worlds it came only as a rumor, a language with the True Names of every being, words that could call forth speech from stones and set the dawn dancing.

In the hands of bureaucrats (lovely English-French word, "government by men who sit at desks"), it became dustier than Latin, rarer than Welsh, bewildering as hieroglyphics. Most practical writing was done in the standard script, swirling circles that could be read backwards and forwards.

He hasn't seen it written in ages—even the encyclopedia volumes in his library are in audio form, so he can hear the long-forgotten voices of his people. The last place he expected to find it was on a home box in the Delirium Archives, but it's the message that took his breath away.

"Hello Sweetie," he told Amy, because he didn't have time to going into all the intimacies of translation. In context, it's just a mark indicating a beginning, but with a sub-temporal conjugation that places the events in the subjunctive state and familiarity with multiple regenerations.

That was the simpler part. He's not sure who wrote this—his future self, possibly, but that would have required a different verb tense—combined a number of terms, including the terms for dextrose and sucrose, with the sense that time is continuing along the correct track and the gold warmth of regenerating into a younger, vibrant form. The flowing words and kaleidoscope of definitions formed a poem in two words:

"Hello Sweetie."


	7. Predestination

t's a lie, what they say about life flashing before a dying person's eyes. River should know, after all; she's done it twice. Not that it lasted long, but that's twice more than anyone still walking around. Except for him, and she doesn't have to tell him it's a lie.

But this time, as she splices wires and adjusts circuits, she thinks it's more like the last piece of a puzzle, the center that defines the whole picture finally complete. So, this is how she dies. No wonder he never told her.

One of the risks of a nonlinear relationship, of course—seeing your spouse die and meeting again. She'd become so used to his clumsy ways, his childish exuberance, that she assumed he'd be there for the beginning as well as the end—his beginning, her end. But this regeneration—so somber, so anxious—she can't tease him, and not just because he doesn't know her. Too many ghosts.

But she was his ghost all along. At first, when she was mostly Mels, she only recognized anger, pain and fear, the emotions of prey before the predator. In Utah, she wasn't really concerned with him—oh, she deluded herself into thinking of it as a grand romantic gesture, but it was really seething rage against her captures, refusal to be their clever weapon any longer.

She'd had a lot of time to think in StormCage, though—twelve thousand consecutive life sentences, after all. On the nights the TARDIS hadn't materialized into her cell or she hadn't decided to test a new toy by breaking out again, she'd run her fingers over the blue diary and let her mind wander. He trusted her—that food for thought lasted a year, with thoughts of her parents reserved for the weekends. Only on the nights when the rain had stopped and the light of a strange sun created rainbows outside her window—the nights when beauty ached more than any loneliness—only then did she muse on the strange, wonderful words he whispered for River.

One night, maybe seven years into it her sentence, he took her out for what was supposed to be a quiet night, sitting above the plane Persephone at one-tenth of one-percent the spend of light, watching as it was terraformed from barren rock to lush jungles and rich oceans. But the Azeerlits (a highly evolved form of obligate anaerobes) had their own plans for the planet, and, as usual, the Doctor and River got trapped in the middle—quite literally, the anaerobes replaced the outer oxygen tanks with a sulfide compound and they ended up having to crawl through the dispersion shafts to escape.

The shafts had fans. Big, fast ones with serrated edges.

She doesn't remember much after that—heavy breathing, being helped (certainly_ not_ carried) back to the TARDIS, four weeks in the StormCage infirmary hooked up to lots of wires that _beepbeepbeeped _when her hearts' rate dropped. There were presents—one, sometimes two or three a day, wrapped in brilliant blue paper without a signature. A blouse to replace the one she'd been wearing—even the 51st century hasn't mastered getting blood out of clothes. A box of jammey dodgers, fresh from Marks & Spencers. A jeweled egg made for the last Russian czar.

"You won't die now," he'd whispered. "You _can't_." In the moment, she'd taken it for encouragement. But during those weeks, she'd analyzed his tone, the furrows where his eyebrows would be. It had sounded, for all the world, like a fact.

So she watched and listened and thought. She can't say _when _she first knew, any more than the moment sunset begins on a stormy day. But the thought grew clearer and clear in her mind, though she'd never say it aloud. _He knows when I die. _ And, later, _he's seen me die._

She's never asked him to confirm it. She didn't tell him about Utah; let him keep this one spoiler, the ending he's known for decades, if not centuries. No wonder it's her catchphrase. When you read a book back-to-front, the conclusion is never in doubt, just the motives.

River glances down at him, handcuffed to a pole. Yes, it always ends this way. She'd been the one who gave Amy those handcuffs, after all. And then accidentally-on-purpose lost the keys. This might even be the same pair, for all she knows.

He fidgets; time's running out. This is his entry point on the Mobius strip of their lives. But she's broken through the fragile loop, falling into darkness.


End file.
